How Fight to Tame TB Made It Stronger

By

Geeta Anand in Mumbai and

Betsy McKay in Atlanta

Updated Nov. 23, 2012 8:14 p.m. ET

The World Health Organization's long-standing strategy for fighting tuberculosis is showing deadly unintended consequences: By focusing for years on the easiest-to-cure patients, it helped allow TB strains to spread that are now all but untreatable by modern medicine.

The WHO and a growing chorus of global health experts are now calling for a significant overhaul in the way nations with widespread drug-resistant TB combat the disease. It amounts to a de facto acknowledgment that the WHO's TB strategy, and the countries...